Throughout the late ‘80s and early ‘90s as blues-rock outfit Nick Barker and The Reptiles, Barker was widely regarded as the top pick in the new guard of Australian rock’n’rollers alongside names like Tex Perkins and Paul Kelly. In 1994 Barker disbanded The Reptiles and started releasing music as Barker releasing the commercially successful and critically lauded Happy Man that featured the brooding Australian grunge classic Time Bomb. His rise to prominence had begun in the early 1980s as bass player for post-punk outfit The Wreckery and pinnacled in 1994 with Barker; he then went on to release four more albums as Nick Barker with the last being Back Water Blues (2009).
However, having always been in it for the music, the burden of expectation has weighed heavily on Barker for the best part of the last 15 years. So it is with great gusto and enthusiasm Barker talks about his new band that does not reference his first or last name, The Heartache State, that he began with long time collaborator Justin Garner.
“Justin is a guy from Adelaide that I have been playing with for a really long time. He was in a really good rock’n’roll band called Southpaw and I produced their album, then he moved over here and was part of my last record [Back Water Blues]. Since then we have been faffing around for the last couple of years,” he explains. “I just wasn’t that jazzed about anything. I was like, ‘I can do another Nick Barker record and then it’s like another Nick Barker record. I was just in doldrums. So I started jamming with Justin a lot, who is a really great rock’n’roll guitar player – he’s really minimal like me but is probably more classic ‘70s rock, like early Aerosmith and The ‘Stones, whereas I’ve got more of that mid-‘80s post punk thing going on. The more I went along with writing this music, I felt like starting a band and dropping my name off completely because everything I have done since I was 23 has had my name on it,” he laughs. “I just didn’t see any advantage in using it anymore, except to have people wanting me to play fucking Make Me Smile.” (Nick Barker and The Reptiles mainstream breakthrough came in 1989 off the back of their cover of the Steve Harley & The Cockney Rebels classic.)
The Heartache State’s self-titled debut is a seriously accomplished album that belies the fact it’s a debut, as it is far from the first time the four members have recorded an album. The remaining two members of The Heartache State is drummer Steve ‘Venom’ Brown and bass player Michael Hubbard.
Barker reveals that on an innate level, The Heartache State’s self-titled record they’re launching on Saturday May 9 at Cherry Bar was heavily inspired by Neil Young & Crazy Horse, “I am a huge Crazy Horse fan and I have read a lot of [Young’s] books where he talks about recording and about how he makes records and why he makes them and that was what I was on about with this record, a Crazy Horse ethic.”
BY DAN WATT
